Long enjoyed as an entertainment piece, Horace's “Trip to Brundisium” has continued to baffle its readers by recounting trivialities while ignoring politics. A brief, tactful hint at great affairs is quickly abandoned:

huc venturus erat Maecenas optimus atque
Cocceius, missi magnis de rebus uterque
legati, aversos soliti componere amicos.
hic oculis ego nigra meis collyria lippus
illinere. interea Maecenas advenit …

(S. [Satire] 1.5.27-31)

In his first hic ego (7), Horace missed dinner because of stomach trouble. In the second (30), he misses Maecenas' arrival—and its meaning—because of eye trouble. Is he unable to see what is going on around him?¹

Horace's persona in Satires 1.5 is well crafted: the naive, good-humored traveling companion, concerned primarily with his own intrusive comforts and discomforts. He likes good food, drink, and sleep, good health and good company, and he especially enjoys his friends: nil ego contulerim iucundo sanus amico (44). He was taken along, it would appear, rather passively from the first (egressum magna me accepit Aricia Roma), on a mission that had something to do with “reconciling friends” who had fallen out. That is all he knows, and all he needs to know.²

We may well suspect that Horace was keeping a diplomatic silence, that Maecenas confided in him, here and elsewhere, precisely because he did not have a “leaky ear.”³ He would be teasing, then: teasing prospective readers who would suspect that he was withholding privileged information with intent to annoy, and (rather beyond his intent?) teasing modern scholars who cannot even take the satire's date for granted, let alone follow the diplomatic maneuvers of Octavian and Antony in 38-37 b.c.⁴ If we follow Horace's lead, all those amusing particulars that render the political picture so opaque convey us insistently into the “little world” of poetry, friendship, and simple human satisfactions. It is tempting to confine our attention to this “little world,” accepting Horace at face value as an amiable entertainer, with brief excursions, perhaps, into comparing the esthetics of his narrative with the reconstructed narrative of the casually autobiographical Lucilius—an attempt that, from insufficient evidence, must also end in frustration. But there is more. I propose here that the poem is both more public and more private than it seems. Reading between the lines, though without abusing allegory, we find Horace deeply implicated in issues of war and peace. Through the distorting lens of the satiric and comic imagination he portrays how a sensitive and thoughtful person might waver between hope for a peaceful, even “friendly” resolution of conflict and skeptical awareness of the gap between personal wish-fulfillment (the “wet dream” of my title) and political reality. Yet this same wavering, and Horace's consequent, very human vacillation between emotional involvement with Rome and Epicurean disengagement, are the stuff of which genuine poetry—and, consistently over time and through different genres, Horatian poetry—is made.

My argument focuses on three aspects of Satire 1.5: the theme of amicitia, private and public; the agon, or insult-match between Sarmentus the scurra and Messius Cicirrus; and the “wet dream” and “failed miracle” sequences toward the end. But first, because Horace's satires are in part exploratory, like all good poetry, and because meanings notoriously shift as a work progresses in time and is made available to different audiences or circles of readers, I begin with a hypothetical framework consisting of (1) the occasion and first plan, (2) the sketching-out and refining of the satire, (3) its first reading(s) to friends, and (4) its first publication in book form. Further questions of reader reception and the organization of the libellus are deferred until the close of the essay.

HYPOTHETICAL STAGES OF COMPOSITION AND RECEPTION

(1) The poem is conceived. We begin with the happy conjunction of two opportunities (kairoi), Roman and Horatian. The larger kairos involves the diplomatic mission of 37, a renewed attempt to prevent (or postpone) conflict between Octavian and Antony, to settle their differences, and to provide for their mutual assistance against Sextus Pompey. All this was accomplished at Tarentum—for the time being. With Symeian hindsight we can see the conference as a major diplomatic victory for Octavian. He was still a junior Caesarian, short of ships, and inexperienced in warfare; Antony might still have joined with Sextus and the senatorial republicans to crush Caesar's revolutionary heir.⁵ As seen in retrospect, Octavian was playing for time, borrowing ships, building up his strength toward Actium. In 37, however, people might still reasonably have hoped for a durable peace agreement, for there was world enough to divide between Antony and Octavian, and no great necessity to fight, and the Caesarian legions were weary of fighting, uncertain whom to support.⁶ In the short run, everyone except Sextus gained from reconciliation. And in the long run? Many war-weary Romans must have practiced denial, preferring, despite history's lessons, to indulge in hope.

And Horace? Was he brought along for comic relief? (Maecenas must have been feeling the pressure.) Or to write up the journey, setting its events in a pleasant, harmless, and politically correct light? It is hard to say. But for Horace, the invitation must have signaled his further belonging, not long after his first acceptance by Maecenas “in the company of his friends” (amicorum in numero, S. 1.6.60-62; cf. S. 2.6.40-42). It also gave him the chance to follow literally and figuratively in the tracks of Lucilius:⁷ their journeys to Sicily and Brundisium would coincide as far as Capua and then diverge, a fine living metaphor for the creative and critical work of Horatian aemulatio.⁸

(2) Horace begins the journey. As he travels, he takes notes, sketches out ideas for his poem, develops a plan. Again we are frustrated: there are no journal entries with which the final version can be compared. Contrast the happy situation of students of eighteenth-century British literature, who not only can compare Johnson's moral and aesthetic choices as shown in his finished Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland (1775) with Boswell's very different choices in his Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785) but also can discover from Johnson's preserved letters to Hester Thrale what personal details he chose to omit from his more abstract, scientific, and proper Journey; or again, from Boswell's earlier manuscript, what details he too very properly (and sometimes self-servingly) omitted from his final Tour. Later, too, we may compare Hester Lynch Piozzi's Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany (1789) with her journal entries in Thraliana for 1786-87. The improvements are not merely artistic. Piozzi changed details, changed descriptions of her feelings of (for example) irritation, indignation, and fear, to convey the consistent persona of a calm, reasonable, good-humored traveler who could take vicissitudes in her stride and appreciate peoples and cultures very unlike her own.⁹

Similarly, Horace must have omitted or played down personal complaints and anxieties, sometimes refining them into a general, good-humored account of the group's collective experience (what was annoying, what was enjoyed) and sometimes using them, I suggest, to hint at larger matters. As he warns a youthful acquaintance many years later, “If you're taken along to Brundisium or lovely Surrentum,” you'd better not complain about one thing after another—the dirt, the cold, the rain, the ransacked luggage—or you'll lose your credibility pretty fast (Ep. 1.17.52-57).¹⁰ A cynical twist here—and a recollection of how Horace played the good sport about travel back in 37?

Along the way Horace must have noted details he could use, episodes he would describe. In the (?) final version, probably written back at Rome after several un-Lucilian revisions, certain episodes are highlighted (the canal trip, the insult-match) while others are drastically curtailed. The journey is articulated subtly into balancing sections and subsections.¹¹ The pace of narrative varies, as though following the actual journey, but despite its apparent casualness it achieves an overall speed and concision that must have made Lucilius seem wordy, careless, and rambling by comparison.¹² It may be that Lucilius meant his account to be serviceable to future travelers, like an early Michelin or Fodor's Guide giving directions, distances in miles, road conditions, and other useful advice about food and drink, inns and innkeepers, places to stay or to avoid.¹³ Horace mentions these things too, dutifully and perhaps somewhat parodically, especially as his poem hastens to its weary end, but he is (it would appear) less scientific than Lucilius, more concerned with the emotional vagaries of human beings and the ways in which these may be caught momentarily in art. We may imagine Horace's satisfaction in completing his satire, shaped and reshaped to modern standards (Callimachean, Neoteric, pre-Augustan) and ready to be presented to a discriminating audience of friends and fellow writers.¹⁴

(3) Horace reads and shows his work to friends. The practice is attested negatively in Satire 1.4, where he emphasizes the non-publicity, hence the non-dangerousness of his satire-writing:

nec recito cuiquam nisi amicis, idque coactus,
non ubivis coramque quibuslibet.

(S. 1.4.73-74)

Whether such “private readings by request” might still have constituted a first “publication” of satire, whether “slanderous” comments might quickly circulate in Rome, is not discussed here.¹⁵ Satire is more aggressive and more dangerous than its ironical master lets on. My point, for now, is that Horace not only writes for a select readership of educated people and friends, several of whom he finally names in Satire 1.10, but enjoys that same in-group,

Plotius et Varius, Maecenas Vergiliusque,

(1.10.81)

together with (perhaps) Valgius, Octavius, Aristius Fuscus, and the Visci, as a living audience whose criticism, encouragement, and sheer pleasure in his performance of satire need not be deferred until the libellus is complete and published.

May we go further and imagine Horace performing his “Journey” for Maecenas and his friends as a special after-dinner entertainment several weeks after the event?¹⁶ Not only would Horace's actual audience coincide momentarily with the ideal implied audience for whom he wrote;¹⁷ it would include figures central to the narrative,

Plotius et Varius Sinuessae Vergiliusque …,

(1.5.40)

for whom Horace evokes the shared pleasures, and also the shared discomforts and frustrations, which they now laugh to recall. We must imagine the varying tonalities of such a performance, over which Horace still has control: the voices assumed, especially for the insult-match; the smiles and laughs and grimaces; and the occasional, carefully controlled comic gesture—for Horace cannot afford to let himself be confused with a mime, let alone with the parasite and clown who provide the comic play within his play. The pleasure of the performance, for poet and audience alike, must have been memorable.

In performance, too, the satire enacts an aesthetic and social agenda. Even as he displays his literary and dramatic skill in competition with Lucilius, Horace confirms his assured position within Maecenas' circle by making himself a spokesman for the aesthetic and moral values, and especially the bond of friendship (amicitia), that hold the group together. He demonstrates, that is, not only his intelligence and wit (always a two-edged sword) but also, with it, the same moral ethos of the liber amicus that is prepared in Satire 1.3, proclaimed in 1.4, and reaffirmed in 1.6 and 1.9. Horace's friends will enjoy seeing through the “naive” persona. Maecenas will be pleased by Horace's discretion in not even hinting at whatever confidences they may have shared. In less than a year Horace's position amicorum in numero has become, not just secure, but centrally creative of the little world it purports to describe.

(4) Horace works steadily toward the publication of Satires book 1 around 35 b.c. Let us for the moment defer discussion of how 1.5 was placed and integrated within the libellus, and how this placement may affect our reading.¹⁸ For now, I want only to stress the importance of relative dating to interpretation. In a way, the publication of around 35 b.c. comes closer to our own nonprivileged reading today than to that hypothetical in-group performance of 37 b.c., for we are ignorant of so much relevant data that Horace's first audience knew at first hand and took for granted. Again, the politics of 35 must have looked and felt very different from those of 37, when the satire was conceived and written. By 35 Sextus had been beaten, Octavian's position strengthened; Antony had distanced himself from the reconciling figure of Octavia; and from various signs, both military and propagandistic, an all-out clash will have seemed more inevitable than before. And Horace's fine balancing act between hope and skepticism, engagement and disengagement, might not, in the later year, have been achieved so nicely.

AMICITIA

Although accounts of the conference at Tarentum in Plutarch, Appian, and Dio are scattered and even contradictory, some elements seem reliable, going back perhaps via Livy to Asinius Pollio. We hear, for example, that when they finally met, Octavian and Antony gave public demonstrations of mutual trust; that skilled intermediaries, notably Cocceius and (unofficially but centrally) Octavia, worked hard for concord; and that the armies rejoiced heartily when the agreement was completed.¹⁹ Again we can say in retrospect that the displays of friendship, especially on Octavian's part, were “play-acting” and fiction. Appian (5.94) puts it realistically: “Thus their behavior constantly swung between suspicion, arising from their desire for power, and trust, arising from their current needs” (trans. John Carter). In the long run, the suspicions proved themselves justified, or created their own reality. (“All's true that is mistrusted,” says Othello.) In the short run, trust may have seized its chance, and Horace's naive endorsement of the spirit of reconciliation (aversos soliti componere amicos, 1.5.29), may have reflected a widespread popular sentiment, not just triumviral propaganda.

Differently, Satire 1.5 privatizes amicitia, taking us from the euphemistic description of the widening breach between Antony and Octavian as a friends' quarrel needing reconciliation (29), through the description of Fonteius Capito as Antony's special friend (33), to Horace's expression of delight at being reunited with his own dear friends:

postera lux oritur multo gratissima; namque
Plotius et Varius Sinuessae Vergiliusque
occurrunt, animae qualis neque candidiores
terra tulit neque quis me sit devinctior alter.
o qui complexus et gaudia quanta fuerunt!
nil ego contulerim iucundo sanus amico.(20)

(1.5.39-44)

Happiness lies in bringing friends together, sadness in their separation (cf. Varius' departure, 93); and the poet who realizes the incomparable value of friendship (nil ego contulerim, 44) knows also the value of reconciliation (aversos … componere amicos, 29). Can a bridge be built, as Horace's insistent repetition of amicus suggests, between the easy friendship of Horace, Virgil, Varius, and Plotius, and the very uneasy alliance of Antony and Octavian?

As Horace describes it, the first, more private amicitia has strong Epicurean overtones. Epicurus had praised, taught, and exemplified the value of friendship as a reliable source of pleasure and security, both private and public. Virgil, Varius, and Plotius may have studied at Naples with the Epicurean Siro, and they knew Philodemus, who lived nearby in Piso's villa at Herculaneum and who wrote, among other things, treatises on flattery (peri kolakeias), a perversion of friendship; and on correcting friends' errors honestly but considerately (peri parrhēsias).²¹ These are Horace's animae candidae. If (to anticipate) we read Satire 1.5 as it comes in the published libellus, after 1.3 and 1.4—the former a vindication of friendship and tolerance, somewhat on Epicurean grounds, against absolutizing Stoic demands; the latter refurbishing Horace's self-image as liber amicus, a good, honest person and friend—then Horace may be presenting himself as a proven connoisseur of friendship as well as poetry, one who may represent and proclaim the group's high human values on the satiric stage. But can these shared private experiments in pleasure and value reach out, as with widening ripples of health (nil ego contulerim iucundo sanus amico, 44), to help heal the ailing commonwealth?²² Or is this an idle dream? I give two versions of Horace's answer, two equally possible readings of 1.5.

In the positive view, amicitia spreads infectiously from private to public along a happy continuum. Virgil's little group of friends, poets, and critics belongs also to Maecenas' circle, which Horace, with some self-irony at the expense of his naive persona, yet represents quite seriously in Satires 1.6 and 1.9 as a charmed sphere of mutual consideration, forbearance, gratitude, and support. Of course, his words help create the reality of which they speak. Although Maecenas was always the “greater friend,” whose status and dignity required a certain respectful distance, it seems that Horace and he succeeded admirably in reviving the genuine amicus-quality in a relationship of amicitia that might so easily, with others, have sunk into mutual exploitation.²³ As for politics: Horace will eventually follow Maecenas, who follows Octavian (Epode 1, in 31 b.c.), but before 35 (Satire 1.10) he proudly claims friends in both camps, ambitione relegata (84). Why, then, shouldn't the poet-friends contribute to the mood of reconciliation in 37? Why shouldn't the brittle, formal amicitia of Octavian and Antony be reanimated by the spirit of genuine friendship that Horace knew and loved so well?

Lucretius began De Rerum Natura with a similar hope. He prayed to Venus—love goddess, mother and patroness of Rome, the creative force of philia that unites, governs, and sustains the living universe—first, to endow his scientific poem with erotic attractiveness, and second, by (the sympathetic magic of) her erotic subjugation of Mars, to grant peace throughout the Roman world:

nam neque nos agere hoc patriai tempore iniquo
possumus aequo animo nec Memmi clara propago
talibus in rebus communi desse saluti.

(DRN 1.41-43)

The mental equilibrium that Epicurus so insistently preached is threatened here by Roman dissension and war. Even a good Epicurean must become involved. Yet Memmius is invited to be more Epicurean, not less. When Lucretius writes

sed tua me virtus tamen et sperata voluptas
suavis amicitiae quemvis efferre laborem
suadet et inducit noctes vigilare serenas …,

(1.140-42)

he is not, I think, simply complimenting a patron or would-be patron. As a better Epicurean, Memmius would be a better friend and ally, would help extend Venus' realm against that of Mars. Although Epicurus urged retreat from public life into the philosophical tranquility of the Garden, his elite Roman followers must sometimes have felt, or wanted to feel, that their private practice of Epicurean quietude and restraint could help to heal a res publica battered by competition and strife.²⁴ Cicero thought otherwise, and even Lucretius must have had his doubts; but still, the hope was there.

So too, I suggest, Horace's “Trip to Brundisium” implies a deep-set wish, and even a hope, that the life forces may win out this time, surging outward from the joys of private friendship to revitalize the greater alliances and bind up the commonwealth's wounds. But there is also (as in Lucretius) a counter-movement of skepticism and fear, enforcing a more negative reading. Say that the great world of Realpolitik is not amenable to the charms of Horace's “little world” of friendship and poetry. Say that amicitia proves deceptive, that Antony and Octavian must inevitably clash, that more Roman blood must be shed by Romans in a tragically unending cycle.²⁵ What then can a sensitive person do but seek refuge from the storm in the seclusion of private life? Epicureanism would then be an escape hatch, not a bridge. Did everyone, Horace included, know that from the start?

The wish to escape from political necessities, as from thoughts of death, recurs throughout Horace's poetry. The early Epode 16 ends despairingly with a call to flight (fuga, both literal and imaginative flight) from the recurring turmoil of civil war and from the vice that is said to pervade the Age of Iron. Although Horace's personal situation improved drastically, and Rome's (however we judge Octavian/Augustus) at least stabilized, that wish to escape remains a notable feature of his poetry, one side of a continuing, almost programmatic vacillation between engagement and disengagement, emotional involvement in Rome's great affairs (nunc desiderium curaque non levis, O. [Odes] 1.14.18) and emotional flight into a happier because more readily controlled world of wine, women, and song—and friends. I give two contrasting later examples.

Ode 2.1 voices appreciation of Pollio's dangerous history writing, his skillful recreation of the civil wars:

Motum ex Metello consule civicum
bellique causas et vitia et modos
          ludumque Fortunae gravisque
                    principum amicitias et arma
nondum expiatis uncta cruoribus. …

(O. 2.1-5)

Horace here catches the historian's thought and exposition: the sequence of events; the “causes, faults, and modes” that characterize, and partly explain, the outbreak, escalation, and further course of war; the governing “play” of chance; and, more particularly, the “damaging friendships of princes.”²⁶ The alliance of Pompey and Caesar did harm; still more, its dissolution. (Can the reader think of another such alliance?) That is the stuff of history as conveyed by an accurate and honest writer. After Horace plunges sympathetically into reenvisioning and emotionally reliving the horrors of civil war, his mind finally recoils; and his command to the lyric Muse to return to her proper (and safer) world of lovemaking (sed ne relictis …) is at once a tribute to Pollio's integrity and skill, a subtle comment on Horace's lyric transmutation of epic material, and an expression of his severe discomfort with renewed emotional involvement, actual or imaginative, in high Roman affairs. He tries it, briefly though programmatically, and he flees.

Ode 3.1, like the Roman Odes (3.1-6) taken together, is more ambivalent. Here Horace builds on earlier odes (2.16, 2.18) and, through them, on Lucretius to proclaim the moral necessity of accepting human limits. He implies that his own hard-won contentment, set against troubling desires and fears (and, not least, the fear of death), might serve as a good example to the commonweal; accordingly, the praise of simplicity and contentment in 3.1 heralds other, more difficult virtues in 3.2-6. Yet the assertion of his personal choice at the poem's end rings ambivalently. If riches and luxuries can't diminish pain—so far, Epicurus and Lucretius—“why should I exchange my Sabine valley for more burdensome riches?” A good example, yes: but also a retreat (and not the last) from the overwhelming complexities and demands of public life. The ode's tone is strongly Epicurean and, in the end, it looks both ways.

So too, I suggest, does the friendship theme earlier in Satire 1.5. It is hopeful to a point, though it keeps the escape hatch always in view. The agon passage to which I now turn is also ambivalent, as an implicit demonstration of poetry's civilized and civilizing play, but also as a veiled reminder of unresolved conflict and the threat of war.

THE AGON

Can violence be contained? This is the subtext of Satire 1.5. War and the threat of war are hinted at, early on, by Horace's mock-heroic ventri indico bellum (7-8); aggressiveness is deployed, also comically, in the exchange of reproaches between slaves and sailors (convicia ingerere, 11-12) and the comic beating of the sluggish mule and sailor who have delayed the canal trip (22-23). At the satire's literal center is the “fight” at Cocceius' comfortable villa, introduced in a significantly brief, mock-Homeric invocation:

                                                                                          nunc mihi paucis
Sarmenti scurrae pugnam Messique Cicirri,
Musa, velim memores, et quo patre natus uterque
contulerit litis.

(1.5.51-54)

This episode, for which I borrow the term agon from Aristophanic comedy, is pointedly extensive (20 lines out of 104), a careful revision of a Lucilian entertainment scene. Has it any bearing on the questions of war and peace that Horace is so carefully not reporting?

Some have thought so, have taken this agon as alluding to the clashes of Roman generals in the civil wars.²⁷ The improbability of any one precise reference—for example, to Sextus Pompey and Octavian!—does not exclude the general likelihood of travesty, if indeed the threatened combat of the great generals, based on ambition and the drive for honor and power, is transformed comically into the insult-match of Messius Cicirrus, the low Oscan clown, and Sarmentus, the parasite and ex-slave. Such travesty always subverts the order of established hierarchies and beliefs, as in Aristophanes' Acharnians and Knights or in Plautus' Miles Gloriosus and Amphitruo, or, for that matter, in the Marx Brothers' film Duck Soup, where the escalating conflict between the peanut seller (Harpo) and the lemonade seller parodies the “normal” course of events leading to war. At the same time, it provides a substitute for history's actual violence, a demonstration of how aggressive impulses threatening the social order may be played out harmlessly, exorcized by the artist's civilizing imagination. Just so, as Johan Huizinga argued in his Homo Ludens: The Play Element in Culture, societies have substituted the verbal duel, the sports contest, and the legal altercation for the unbounded warfare and bloodshed that preceded them.²⁸

It would be worth asking how far Huizinga's theories might be corroborated by the history of gladiatorial contests at Rome, in all their murderous violence, or by the developed procedures of the law courts, whose oratorical duels, including insult-exchanges, defined the great Republican game in which riches, power, and political influence were daily won and lost. Lucilius' satires reenact such contests as secondhand entertainment. Book 4 included a mock-heroic version of a notable, though one-sided gladiatorial contest involving the famous Pacideianus.²⁹ In book 2 Lucilius travestied a legal contest between Albucius and Mucius Scaevola notable (at least in the retelling) for the vehemence of its insult-exchanges and ending with a practical joke that, according to Scaevola, accounted for Albucius' personal hostility (inimicitia) toward him.³⁰ Similarly, and perhaps in deliberate imitation of Lucilius, Horace's Satire 1.7 gives a comic account of a legal altercation judged by Brutus in 43, when he was propraetor of Asia. It ends with a bad joke (and a dangerous one) on Rupilius Rex: cur non hunc Regem iugulas? Let Brutus show himself worthy of his ancestry by slaughtering/condemning this King. The joke, indeed the entire satire, pays a backhanded tribute both to the older Lucilian satire with its privileged libertas of abuse, and to the free-spirited competition of the pre-Caesarian law courts (which Cicero recalled so nostalgically in his Brutus). A few years later, and these rough Republican games have become strangely obsolete, a thing of the almost distant past, like Brutus himself.

But Horace was not simply nostalgic for that Republican libertas, either in politics or in poetry. Rather, in Satire 1.4 and later, he redefines satire's aesthetic and moral aims away from casual lampooning, toward more careful artistry and better, more sociable humor. As scholars from Hendrickson to Freudenburg have argued, Horace's theory of the development of satire, and of his own role in that ongoing development, owed much to Aristotle's version of the development of Greek comedy from casual improvisation to ordered plot and from unbridled aggressiveness, license, and attacks on individuals to the more general, restrained, civilized, and truly “liberal” humor of social comedy, best realized in the post-Aristophanic comedy of Aristotle's own time (and, for later Peripatetic theorists, by Menander).³¹ One oxymoron says it all: good comedy is pepaideumenē hybris, “educated insolence.”³² And so, in Horace's version of the prehistory of modern (comedy or) satire: the aggressiveness of popular, holiday funmaking got out of hand, attacking people indiscriminately (like a rabid dog), and had to be controlled by law. Aesthetically, too, like all Latin verse, it had to be civilized and shaped to the standard of the best Greek models, and thereby brought into conformity with generic as well as social “laws.”³³ Had fate somehow thrust Lucilius into our own age, says Horace (building ironically on Lucilius' own critical pronouncements about poetry and drama), he would not have written such rambling verses, or attacked his “enemies” so indiscriminately. Rather, he would have written (like Horace) with more art, and with better manners, and might even have contributed (as Horace intends) to making the world a more decent and friendly place in which to live.

As it presently stands in the libellus, Satire 1.5 gives a practical demonstration of the aesthetic and moral principles enunciated, however ironically, in 1.4, and of Horace's own very civilized competition (aemulatio) with Lucilius, in whose footsteps he literally and figuratively follows—up to a point. Unfortunately, we cannot make detailed comparisons. The agon should be a test case: similarities of subject matter, as in the use of “likenings” (Greek eikasmoi) by both Lucilius and Horace, probably revealed subtle differences of art and taste.³⁴ Lucilius' best insult, non peperit, verum postica parte profudit (119M), has found no echo in Horace. What we observe rather, and may reasonably suspect was lacking in Lucilius, is the careful artistry, the narrative speed and conciseness (as in the Hellenistic iambos or literary mime) with which the combatants are presented, the combat played out. What is described as a delicious, prolonged entertainment of Cocceius' travel-weary guests has been rendered in twenty hexameter lines (mock-heroic grandeur, comic mimesis, and all), in programmatic contrast to a contest in Lucilius that may have been, like the journey as a whole, some three times as long. Nunc mihi paucis, indeed!

Significantly, too, Horace has taken the kind of reported agon that constituted the whole of Satire 1.7 and Lucilius' book 2, and has framed it within the larger structure of Satire 1.5. Our answer(s) to that earlier question “Can violence be contained?” will depend on how we read the relation between the insult-match inset and the larger poetic and diplomatic journey.

Although the contest between Messius and Sarmentus does not end even in arbitrary victory for either combatant, as Satire 1.7 does, and as Lucilius' Albucius/Scaevola agon did, its framing here suggests a kind of closure. The clown conflict enhances the dinner party but has no continued existence outside it. Again, as suggested earlier, the distinction of “Horace” the privileged narrator outside the frame from Sarmentus the player within it may point to another desirable distinction, between Horace the liber amicus and full participant in Maecenas' circle, and Sarmentus the mere professional entertainer, who might almost be Horace's shadow self.³⁵ On a different, metasatirical level, the framed agon enacts Horace's larger competition with Lucilius and his fautores for control of the world of satire; and Horace's clear victory in this larger literary agon also implies a victory of those civilized and civilizing values, at once aesthetic and moral, for which he stands.

Can violence be contained? Within the aesthetic realm here represented by satire, it can; for Horace's satire, by subduing contentiousness to art more than twice over, suggests that the poet can be a public educator, as Lucilius (for all his virtues) was not. For Lucilius pursued private and political feuds with various inimici, while representing himself as Virtue's stalwart champion: witness the great Virtus fragment and Horace's backhanded compliment,

scilicet uni aequus virtuti atque eius amicis.(36)

(S. 2.1.70)

Differently, Horace's satire journeys outward from the “little,” protected world of friendship and poetry making into a larger, more dangerous Roman world where, more than ever before, “friends” must be “brought together” and their potentially murderous competition rendered harmless for the common good. Might even a sheltered poet contribute to this end through the civilizing power of play and art, as also through the contagious practice of friendship?

That is one way of reading the inset. But there is another, more subversive and troubling reading. If the little agon is a microcosm of the larger satire, then we may become alerted to the truth that satire is itself a game, a most civilized and civilizing game, to be sure, yet in the end only a game, played out within the bounds of a (for now) protected literary and social playground. But outside, in the unmapped larger world of politics and war, can any limits hold? Virgil asks similar questions in his Eclogues. His sheltered, hypercivilized world of pastoral, and of poetry and friendship, has an almost Orphic power to transform nature, yet is finally vulnerable to the invasive passions of love and war and the displacements of history. So too with satire. Can Horace's game, however well played, really exorcize the forces of aggressiveness and violence? How long can his mild satiric laughter, his “educated mockery,” keep them at bay? Maybe only for a brief, happy moment on the journey, which will continue through difficulties, frustrations, and (comic) disappointments: the “wet dream,” the failed miracle at Gnatia, the inconclusive “arrival” at Brundisium.

WET DREAM, FAILED MIRACLE

Among later difficulties Horace recounts what may, for quite extraneous reasons, have become the best-remembered event of his journey:

hic ego mendacem stultissimus usque puellam
ad mediam noctem exspecto: somnus tamen aufert
intentum Veneri; tum immundo somnia visu
nocturnam vestem maculant ventremque supinum.

(1.5.82-85)

It is well told. He waits, expectantly and obscenely “intent on Venus,” but in place of the promised assignation he only gets, after finally and wearily falling asleep, a wet dream. It is all very humiliating. “The man who doesn't get laid” is, of course, a familiar figure in comedy, from Cinesias in Aristophanes' Lysistrata to Sceparnio in Plautus' Rudens, who, after almost assaulting Ampelisca earlier, must stand onstage like a gaping idiot, holding the “sacred urn of Venus,” until he realizes that she won't show up after all. (It isn't her fault, but that doesn't affect the joke.) Differently, Horace's episode may owe something to Lucretius' description in book 4 of the deceptive power of dreams, climaxing in (a) the children who dream that they are urinating outdoors at the latrine, but in reality soak the beautiful bedcovers; and then (b) the adolescent youths tricked by gorgeous sexual images:

qui ciet irritans loca turgida semine multo,
et quasi transactis saepe omnibu' rebu' profundant
fluminis ingentis fluctus vestemque cruentant.

(DRN 4.1034-36)

Lucretius' account joins disparate elements: the scientist's clinical account of sexuality, sympathetic evocation of the youth's sensuous yearnings, and a perhaps personal memory of the disturbing violence of (male) sexuality, whose earliest manifestations can sometimes be traumatic. All this, especially the deceptiveness, provides an easy transition to Lucretius' climactic attack on the passion of love that concludes book 4.³⁷ It may be significant that Horace treats his wet dream more lightly, as a good joke on himself. Has it any bearing on larger issues?

Scholars have generally ignored this episode, written it off as “embarrassing,” or diverted their attention to Horace's possible imitation of a similar scene in Lucilius, in which case the “wet dream” might have been as much a generic fiction as the shield that Horace threw away at Philippi. Unfortunately, Lucilius' wet dream seems itself to be a useful fiction, arising from a circular argument from Horace to reconstructed Lucilius and back again to Horace.³⁸ If indeed Lucilius described a sexual encounter with a caupona in book 3, it was probably successful. To judge from surviving fragments, his usual persona was that of a man who enjoyed sex and who kept control of the situation, much as “Archilochus” did before him in the Cologne Epode. Once, to be sure, he has recourse to masturbation, perhaps after an erotic disappointment like Horace's; but still, those “tears” of frustration were easily “wiped away.”³⁹

I venture to guess (a) that the wet dream really happened,⁴⁰ and (b) that Horace welcomed its literary possibilities. Perhaps he contrasted his own sexual failure with Lucilius' success. That would suit the general impotence of his “Flaccus” persona, the rather passive, quiet-loving fellow whom other, more aggressive types would walk over, given half the chance. But I would go further and argue that Horace's deceiving dream is connected with the prospects, for good or bad, of the diplomatic mission of 37. Hence the title of this essay.

Most simply, Horace may be suggesting that hopes for a settled agreement and a lasting peace are illusory, “only a wet dream.” The negotiations, that is, may produce only a deceptive (and politically correct) image of amicitia, not the real thing. The treaty of Brundisium in 40 fell short of its promise (partly celebrated by Virgil in Eclogue 4); there might even be a hint in Horace's episode of how Antony was “stood up” by Octavian in 38 when he sailed to Brundisium and was not met there. A cynical reading of the “wet dream” seems inviting. It may be, however, that Horace is tempering genuine hopefulness about peace with a caution familiar from fable and proverb, introducing an indecent and very funny version of “Don't count your chickens before they're hatched!” Or, differently, he might be offering up his personal humiliation as a kind of apotropaic magic, a substitute frustration to ward off the gods' envy and forestall the greater disappointment of failed peace negotiations. Obscenity is often apotropaic. We might compare frustration scenes from Aristophanes' Acharnians and Lysistrata, and especially Peace, where hope and skepticism, a sense of the gods' gifts and a sense of the urgency of human effort, are kept in comic balance. So too, in Horace's satire, there may be a delicate, carefully negotiated balance between the three possible attitudes just now suggested.

A second episode highlighted by Horace, the failed “miracle” at Gnatia, tilts the satire more decisively toward skepticism:

                                                                                          dein Gnatia lymphis
iratis exstructa dedit risusque iocosque,
dum flamma sine tura liquescere limine sacro
persuadere cupit. Credat Iudaeus Apella,
non ego: namque deos didici securum agere aevum,
nec si quid miri faciat natura, deos id
tristis ex alto caeli demittere tecto.

(1.5.97-103)

Horace speaks here as one who has memorized his Epicurean catechism, word for word. Lucretius had warned his readers that unless they thoroughly accepted the principle that every event in nature, however miraculous-seeming, can and must be explained in terms of natural causation and scientific law—a principle carefully illustrated, after Epicurus, in the various but complementary accounts of thunder, lightning, and the thunderbolt in book 6—they may “be swept back” into the old religious beliefs and practices through impulses of wonder or terror:

nam bene qui didicere deos securum agere aevum,
si tamen interea mirantur …

(DRN 5.82-83 = 6.58-59)

“Not me,” says Horace. Perhaps he, or his now pseudo-sophisticated persona, protests too much. But perhaps, too, he takes some pride in distinguishing himself from the superstitious throng, much as he distinguished himself earlier from the ordinary run of clowns, parasites, and mere entertainers. He may laugh a little at the doctrinaire followers of Epicurus, much as he does in Satire 1.3 (99-112), where he gives a hilarious “instant” version of Lucretius' account (over many lines, and countless years) of the slow, gradual development of society, language, law, and civilization. Yet there, despite the parody, Horace clearly sees Epicurean (or Democritean) anthropology as reinforcing humane practices of friendship against Stoic absolutism. And so here, despite the touch of parody and self-irony, Horace's disbelief in miracles may go deep, and its placement just before the arrival at Brundisium may be pointed. “It will be a miracle if things work out—and I don't believe in miracles!”

The point is supported by a second, less obvious Lucretian echo from a passage about the creation of human beings, who were not “let down from heaven by a golden rope,”

haud, ut opinor, enim mortalia saecla superne
aurea de caelo demisit funis in arva,(41)

(DRN 2.1153-54)

which Horace conflates with Virgil's “Messianic” line

iam nova progenies caelo demittitur alto

(E. 4.7)

to produce his own

tristis ex alto caeli demittere tecto.

(S. 1.5.103)

Virgil's high prophecy in Eclogue 4 included a deliberate undoing of Lucretius' denial, a playful remythologizing of the old Golden Age picture of human happiness and ease, now to be regained as the world winds backward through various mystic stages, through and away from struggle and war. By contrast, Horace returns to Lucretian orthodoxy. Miracles just don't happen. If things turn out well, it won't be by divine intervention, but rather by human effort, perseverance, and sheer muddling through. Which may be what this journey is finally about.

The satire ends abruptly, as Horace comes to the end of poem and journey alike:

Brundisium longae finis chartaeque viaeque est.

(1.5.104)

He has completed the twofold job of traveling with the embassy and writing up the trip. The abrupt ending works like a punch line elsewhere, or a blackout. In the “little world” of poetry and friendship, of literary endeavor in the competitive field of satire and promotion of good humor within the (allegedly) noncompetitive circle of Maecenas and his friends, Horace's ending marks a definite achievement, a modestly implied fulfillment. In the “greater world” of politics and history, closure might seem arbitrary, not least (as will be seen in retrospect) when it befalls at Brundisium; for in fact, Maecenas and his fellow diplomats went on to Tarentum, where Octavian and Antony (temporarily) settled their business about ships, legions, and Sextus Pompey.⁴² Was Horace left behind at Brundisium? Are poets only useful, or entertaining, up to a point? Are the great events of history carried on, beyond their understanding or control, for good or ill? That is not clear. The near-miracles of honest friendship, good humor, and good poetry carry us to Brundisium and no farther. Horace's satire might be called “Making It to Brundisium.” Its task has been well accomplished. It will find a decent resting place at last in the published libellus of 35. For the diplomats doing Rome's business and, differently, for Horace as he conducts his own shuttle diplomacy between public and private, between emotional involvement in Rome's affairs and emotional disengagement or flight back into the pleasures and accomplishments of private life, the journey—at once of poetry and of life—will continue.

THE PUBLISHED SATIRE

I suggested earlier that however Satire 1.5 might have been heard in 37 b.c., its personal and historical meanings will have shifted by 35: partly because it was read now by strangers, not heard by friends and fellow travelers, and partly because history had moved on, the balance of power was shifting, a final conflict (Actium) may have seemed more inevitable than before; so that, seen in retrospect, skepticism about the negotiations of 37 must have overbalanced hope. Horace's earlier feelings and intentions, which I have tried here to reconstruct, now become less relevant, not to say less authoritative; for, as he himself knew and pointed out humorously in Epistle 1.20, the published book escapes its master's control.⁴³ Let me turn to a related, more limited question. Why did Horace give Satire 1.5 that particular placement in the libellus? What new meaning(s) might it have adopted while still in the author's controlling hands, in that carefully arranged sequence?

By most accounts, Horace's first book of satires (a) has a tripartite arrangement with a coda (1-3, 4-6, 7-9; 10), and/or (b) falls into two halves (1-5, 6-10).⁴⁴ The overall structure comes remarkably close to Virgil's book of ten eclogues in its overall plan and detailed contrasts. In both, the fifth poem stands out, whether as a climax of the first half, before a significantly new beginning, or as the centerpiece of the central group of poems. How, then, should Satire 1.5 be read in relation to satires placed before and after?

In Satires 1.1-3 (to follow the tripartite structure), Horace experiments with diatribe satire on ethical themes: most simply and effectively in 1.1, on avarice; with more self-mocking incoherence in 1.2, on sex; and turning against satire itself and the usual persona of the aggressively critical satirist in 1.3, on friendship and tolerance. This gives an easy transition to the more personal Satires 1.4-6, where he plays out his choices in literature and in life, redefining the aesthetic and moral aims of satire, as against Lucilius, and reinventing his own satiric persona, if not also (as I would argue) himself, as liber amicus, an honest man and a good friend. Satires 1.7-9 are simpler, perhaps earlier and more Lucilian entertainment pieces; and 1.10 reaffirms Horace's debt to his precursor even as he proclaims his adherence to the best literary standards of his own time, in close company with Virgil, Varius, and his other friends and primary readers.

Thematically, then, 1.5 builds on 1.3 and 1.4. Most obviously, its aemulatio of Lucilius tests out the redefinition of satire heralded, though with strong self-irony and -contradiction, in 1.4 I have argued that competition with Lucilius is an important subtext of 1.5, especially as mirrored in the agon. But 1.5 builds also on Horace's cumulative exploration of amicitia in 1.3 and 1.4. He has turned satire against the inhuman Stoic standards that so easily destroy friendship because of minor offenses that someone has committed (the “censorious” critic being unaware of his own, often greater failings); and his satire writing has distanced itself more than ironically from the character Lucilianus, the aggressive spirit with which Lucilius, and satire generally, have become identified. All this prepares the reader for 1.5, where, if we read between the lines, Horace is taken along not merely as an entertainer, but as a liber amicus and an expert though unofficial adviser, precisely, in the business of maintaining and restoring friendship, aversos solit(us) componere amicos.

Horace's “Journey to Brundisium” may be read, then, as the high point of Satires book 1, corresponding roughly to Virgil's Eclogue 5, the Daphnis poem and center of the visionary Eclogues 4-6.⁴⁵ This is Horace's furthest venture into public affairs, a high-water mark of his involvement with Rome's great affairs, or his attempted involvement—for politics and history are, in the end, frighteningly beyond his grasp. It seems all the more significant, then, that in 1.6, the concluding poem of 1.4-6 and the new beginning of 1.6-10, Horace moves inward, away from the world of Roman politics in which he no longer has a place, into Maecenas' accepting circle; and, more inward still, into his almost pastoral enjoyment of otium even in great Rome. In the “little world” of poetry, friendship, and self-reflection, he can (for the time being) feel content.

Let me return briefly to the parallel with Virgil's libellus. Leach has argued that poem 10 in both collections summarizes the poet's literary achievement but also the limits of that achievement: for Virgil, both in personal life, for the passion of love cannot be calmed, let alone contained, by the ease of pastoral; and in history, for (as Putnam too has argued, not least in his dark reading of Eclogue 9) the achievement of poetry depends finally on peaceful surroundings, quietness of spirit, and the gifts or favor of the “gods.”⁴⁶

Horace's epilogue, Satire 1.10, seems brighter and more confident than Virgil's. It affirms Horace's pride in his satiric achievement, even as it places that achievement securely within the sphere of Virgil and Varius, of good modern poetry. Horace surely knows, with Virgil, that the pleasures of friendship and poetry in the “little world” are vulnerable to events in the “great world” beyond their control. Although Virgil's singers possess an Orphic power to re-create nature, their voice can still, in bad times, be silenced. No more can the apotropaic magic of Horace's Satires and Epodes ward off external dangers. Still, Horace feels his powers, in Satire 1.10 as in 1.5; the journey has been exciting and, in many ways, successful; and the retreat in 1.6 into private life may yet prove, as its placement suggests, both an end and a beginning. Over time, Horace's poetic variations on the dance theme of advance and retreat will stamp his experiments in different poetic genres with the continuing impression of his special personality and genius.⁴⁷

Notes

1. The literal malady can be treated with ointment, but figuratively, Horace sees more clearly than he pretends (or better, sees through the comic mask of nigra collyria); cf. S. 1.3.25-26 earlier, on forgiving friends, a theme highly relevant to the present satire: cum tua pervideas oculis mala lippus inunctis, / cur in amicorum vitiis tam cernis acutum? Differently, Stahl (1974, 31) sees Horace as restoring his sense of priorities, “nachdem sie durch politisches Übergewicht gefährdet war.”

2. DuQuesnay (1984, 41) calls this “a masterpiece of understatement which minimizes the tension and makes inevitable the successful outcome of the negotiations.” The poem, he argues, “justifies the propaganda of the Triumvirs, who advertised their continuing friendship after Tarentum” (40).

3. Cf. S. 2.6.46, et quae rimosa bene deponuntur in aure, with the popular reaction, 53-54 (“ut tu … semper eris derisor”) and 57-58 (his allegedly superhuman silence). He is, of course, a mocker; S. 2.6.42-43 (quem tollere raeda … vellet iter faciens) may recall the Journey to Brundisium; and later, in O. 3.2.25-26, Horace's longtime fidele silentium may implicitly entitle him to some honor in the world of heroic attainment. On the dangers of loose talk cf. S. 1.3.94-95 and, in later retrospect, Ep. 1.18.37-38, 67-71.

4. On dating see Pelling 1988, 214 (37 more likely, but perhaps 38; cf. Rudd 1966, 280-81), and Pelling 1996, 25-27, on the conference at Tarentum and its political background (with n. 112, “a July-August date is most likely”). The main sources, none of them altogether reliable, are Plut. Ant. 35, App. BC 5.93.386-95.398, Dio Cass. 48.54.3; we badly miss Pollio. For the historical use of the term kairos cf. Ant. 30.5 on the opportunity for peace before Brundisium made possible by Fulvia's death.

5. Syme 1939, 213 (Octavian's need and fear), 226 (the aftermath): “Antonius had lost the better part of two years, sacrificing ambition, interest and power.”

6. Christopher Pelling kindly reviewed with me the hard facts behind the peace negotiations, including the war-weariness and uncertain loyalty of the legions in 37. Cf. Pelling 1988, 201, on Brundisium earlier.

7. For the remains of Lucilius' journey-satire in book 3 see Marx 1904, 9-12 (text), and 1905, 46-71 (commentary); also Cichorius [1908] 1964, 251-61 (mostly following Marx, with a few modifications), and Krenkel 1970, 140-59 (text, translation, commentary). Lucilius probably went to Sicily after the Servile War in Sicily, so between 120 and 116 b.c.: to inspect his property and see to a sick bubulcus (105M), and perhaps to deal with a severe crisis involving hardship and conflict (Marx 1905, 46-48). We might well compare passages from book 3 with stories and anecdotes from the Numantine campaign, dedicated to Scipio as a sort of Commentarii de Bello Numantino (cf. Puelma 1978, 77). Scipio might have brought Lucilius along to celebrate his military deeds in verse, but what emerged were Stories from the Front (154-57).

8. Lucilius' journey took him to Capua, then either by land on the Via Popilia as fat as Valentia or, more likely, by sea from Puteoli (Marx 1905, 45). Horace reaches Capua at line 47, nearly halfway through his satire, and then diverges from Lucilius' route. Radke (1989) gives a finely detailed account of his probable itinerary, taking the Via Minucia to Brundisium. Significantly, the “road not taken,” the Via Appia, went to Brundisium via Venusia (Horace's birthplace) and Tarentum.

9. Johnson and Boswell: Rogers 1993. Johnson's letters to Hester Thrale: Redford 1993, 51-119. Boswell's earlier manuscript: Pottle and Bennett 1967. Sherman (1996, 185-222) brilliantly analyzes this “diurnal dialectic in the Western Islands” against the long, gradual development of the travel diary and narrative; his account is suggestive for Horace's hypothetical improvements on Lucilius. Cf. Harrison 1987, 44-45, on Horace's impression of Lucilius' published poems “as a versified diary or notebook,” inartistic and indiscreet. For Piozzi see Marrs 1997, esp. ch. 3, “Mrs. Piozzi, the Good-Natured Traveler.”

10. Although the weather has changed, some details remain suggestive:

    Brundisium comes aut Surrentum ductus amoenum,
    qui queritur salebras et acerbum frigus et imbris,
    aut cistam effractam et subducta viatica plorat. …

    (Ep. 1.17.52-54)

    Cf. also Ep. 1.18.20 for a closely related reminiscence: Brundisium Minuci melius via ducat an Appi. Differently, Leach (1978, 90) sees Satire 1.5 as marking Horace's personal success: “how far the man of humble country origins has come as a sophisticated city dweller keenly sensitive to the incommodities of provincial accommodation.”

11. For structural and narrative technique see Sallmann 1974, 186-97, with a nice appreciation of Horace's “virtuoses Wechseln zwischen Nah- und Fernperspektive, mit dem das persönliche Beteiligtsein des Erzählers am Reiseverlauf in sinnvoller Abstufung gekoppelt ist” (197). Cf. also Freudenburg 1993, 201-2, and the perceptive comments of Gowers (1993) on Horace's “diversions” in journey and poem (51) and his changes and variations of pace (53, 56-58), concluding that “the journey poem is a chart full of circumscriptions, suggesting all the constraints that have led modern satire to be rerouted” (60).

12. Horace's criticisms of Lucilius in Satires 1.4, 1.10, and 2.1 are well known and often cited, although we may miss elements of humor and caricature; cf. Harrison 1987. What we fail, for lack of evidence, to imagine is Lucilius' creative originality in his journey poem, as elsewhere, and the kinds of incentive it provided for Horace's aemulatio.

13. Most probably, Lucilius wrote for a friend who had missed the trip but might well take another. Cichorius ([1908] 1964, 256-59) suggested that book 3 included at least two separate poems: one a propemptikon, another on Lucilius' journey.

14. This would be the “provisional clean text” posited by Quinn (1982, 170), to be submitted, both orally and in writing, to trusted friends and critics. Horace might make further revisions (a) following their advice and (b) later on, when preparing the libellus for publication.

15. Horace's warning against publishing prematurely or leaving unpublished drafts around, nescit vox missa reverti (AP 390), might also apply to verses read aloud at some point and circulated around town.

16. Both Quinn (1982, 158) and Fantham (1996, 70-71) suggest that the more formal public recitatio introduced by Asinius Pollio grew naturally from after-dinner recitations. The convivial setting may also be mirrored in S. 2.6.70-117 (Cervius' fable as edifying postprandial entertainment); perhaps also in S. 2.2.1-7 if, as I suspect, Horace is asking his fellow dinner guests, comfortably wined and dined, to imagine themselves as ascetic would-be philosophers: verum hic impransi mecum disquirite (7).

17. See Muecke 1990, esp. 34-35, on Horace's fictive and actual audiences.

18. I am assuming, given no evidence to the contrary, that revisions of 1.5 between the years 37 and 35 were minimal.

19. Plut. Ant. 35.3; App. BC 5.94; Dio Cass. 48.54.3-5; also the fragments of Livy, book 127 (a bit garbled, but the armies' happiness in joining together, cum magna laetitia, may go back to Pollio).

20. Thus Classen (1973) sees friendship as a dominant theme of 1.5: strong, reliable private friendships are contrasted with “eine Freundschaft zwischen den Grossen, die erzwungen werden soll, um politischen Zwecken zu dienen” (250).

21. As Long and Sedley point out (1987, II no. 22, 134-39), Epicurean friendship created and still maintains the social fabric, together with law and justice; cf. DRN 5.1019 (amicitiem coeperunt iungere), 1145-46 (nam genus humanum, defessum vi colere aevum / ex inimicitiis languebat). “It is not surprising, then, that Lucretius links sentimental and prudential considerations in his account of the origin of friendships between neighbors, or that his account of its motivation is the social contract that defines justice” (137). For Philodemus' connection with the Latin poets in Siro's school (Virgil, Varius, Plotius, Quintilius) and, less directly, with Horace see Tait 1941; Gigante 1984, 67-92; Gigante and Capasso 1989; Gigante 1990, 29-36, 56-60; also, on Philodemus and Horace, Oberhelman and Armstrong 1995. Gigante argues suggestively for the practical, not just theoretical influence of “il grande messaggio di civiltà epicurea nella sintesi di parrhesia, philia, charis, eunoia che presentava in modo esemplare la comunità epicurea” (1990, 35).

22. Cf. Anderson 1982, 21, on Horace's high valuation here of the simple pleasures of life as against political competition and travail, and Van Rooy 1965, 51-52, 57-59, on the thematic uses of the sanus/insanus contrast (among other striking connections) in 1.4 and 1.5.

23. So Konstan argues (1995), following Brunt (1965), that amicus is not just synonymous with client or patron. “There was … a tense dialectic between amicitia and clientship. But the rhetorical tendency to assimilate the two ideas could be disrupted by irony or satire just because they remained implicitly distinct” (341). Even in politics “it was a personal bond that was able to survive disagreement and conflicting ambitions in the public sphere” (335 n. 28). Again, Konstan argues (1997, 122-48) for amicitia at Rome as a continuum from close, intimate relations to respectful public connections; but we see it most clearly in the private sphere, in “a relationship of mutual fondness and commitment” transcending inequality, like that of Horace and Maecenas (137).

24. For Lucretius' (not entirely negative) attitude toward political life see Fowler 1989. Epicureanism may sometimes have lent itself to practical mediation and compromise: cf. Syme 1939, 135-36, on L. Piso.

25. For deceptive “friendship” cf. Tacitus' damning anti-Augustus summary in Ann. 1.10.3: sed Pompeium imagine pacis, sed Lepidum specie amicitiae deceptos; post Antonium, Tarentino Brundisinoque foedere et nuptiis sororis inlectum, subdolae adfinitatis poenas morte exsolvisse. Tacitus puts Tarentum first in this hendiadys of treachery in order to build to the greater deception of the marriage alliance.

26. Cf. Lyne 1995, 92 and n. 26: “Horace uses amicitia here in its cynical, political sense” (with several examples); also the fine analysis of complexity and vision in “Ode 2.1” by Lowrie (1997, 175-86): “Pollio's history has drawn Horace more into the topic than he would wish, into narration, into epic and history. … All the distance that kept the trauma safely in the past, in someone else's history, vanishes” (185).

27. See Rudd 1966, 57, and Sallmann 1974, 185-86, on attempts to find political allegory in 1.5.

28. Huizinga 1955, esp. “Play and Law” (76-88) and “Play and War” (89-104).

29. Lucil. 149-58M. Marx suggests (1905, 73) that the gladiatorial combat described in book 4 was preceded by verbal skirmishing and insult-exchange like that in book 3, 117-22. Horace may draw on both episodes: note the rhinoceros at 159M, attributed to book 4, not 3.

30. See Gruen 1992, 289-91: Lucilius “had a field day with both protagonists” (290). However, we cannot tell how much coloring he added to the actual trial.

31. Freudenburg 1993, 52-108.

32. On Aristotle's “shrewd oxymoron” in Rhet. 1289b10-12 see Halliwell 1991, 292; also 284: “wit, he adds, is a form of educated/cultured hybris—behaviour, that is, which would be offensive and insulting if it were not transmuted (by verbal form and social context) into an admissible strain of mutually pleasurable communication.”

33. Ep. 2.1.142-55 (festive comedy); cf. the complex joke about satire and the law at S. 2.1.79-86.

34. Marx (1905, 55) sees the agon in Lucilius book 3 as an insult-contest between scurrae or, more likely, gladiators; there may be overlap, or confusion, between books 3 and 4. Cichorius ([1908] 1964, 253) doubts that an actual gladiatorial contest occurred in book 3. His reasons are unconvincing, but he may be right, following Lachmann, to posit a contest between two scurrae that parodied a gladiatorial combat—cf. Horace's mutual-admiration contest at Ep. 2.2.95-101! Terzaghi (1934, 297-98) suggests the burlesque performance of an Atellana, with insults followed by blows. Fiske (1971, 308) follows Cichorius. He also suggests (n. 217) that Messius played Cicirrus, the Cock, an Atellane role.

35. Damon (1997, 109-12) places Sarmentus, with other scurrae, in the parasite tradition. He will resurface in Juv. 5.3-4 as a type who will put up with (almost) anything: cf. Braund 1996, 276-77. Although Horace has established himself in Satire 1.4 as a liber amicus (cf. Hunter 1985, 480-85), Sarmentus, the freedman, may be one of those shadow selves, like the ineptus of 1.9, that Horatian satire (vainly?) attempts to expel. See now Oliensis 1998, 29: “The other point about this satiric entertainment [in addition to its not drawing blood] is that it is not Horace who provides it. For the benefit of those detractors who imagine him to play the buffoon for the amusement of his social superiors, Horace takes care to locate himself very definitely in the audience, far above the satiric boxing ring. The men who take his place in the ring are men without face.”

36. Horace's comment, that Lucilius was only “a match for / fair to” Virtue and her friends, may recall Lucilius' specific boast in the great Virtus fragment (1326-38M),

    hostem esse atque inimicum hominum morumque malorum,
    contra defensorem hominum morumque bonorum,
    hos magni facere, his bene velle, his vivere amicum,

    (1334-36)

    as well as his political partisanship elsewhere and his zestful participation in political and personal feuds.

37. Thus Brown 1987, 199: cruentant (4.1036) looks forward to the blow, wound, and spurting of blood at 1049-57. I would add that it also conveys something of the male adolescent's psychological experience of shock and injury (crede perito) when his first nocturnal emission comes. Brown also points out (68-76) that although the wet dream may be understood physiologically as a simple release of tension, the mix of effluences (simulacra) and illusion is programmatic for the subsequent account of amor and its dangers: sic in amore Venus simulacris ludit amantis (4.1101).

38. The modest suggestion of Marx (1905, 140) that Lucilius might have been waiting for a faithless girl with “the pains of Tantalus” (fr. 140-41), and his tentative comparison of fr. 1248, permixi lectum, imposui pede pellibus labes, was carried further by subsequent scholars who wanted more definitely to transfer fr. 1248 to book 3, interpreting Lucilius from Horace—and Horace, in a circular argument here and elsewhere, from Lucilius. Rudd (1966, 55) is more cautious. (He also points out that the poenae of Tantalus at fr. 140-41 may have manifested themselves in stomach trouble, not sex.)

39. Fr. 307M, at laeva lacrimas muttoni absterget amica: a man substitutes his ready left hand (laeva) for an unavailable mistress (amica). Krenkel (1970) compares, for this interpretation, Mart. 9.41, 11.73.4. There may be a similar sexual reference at 206M, absterge lacrimas.

40. Thus Rudd (1966, 54-56) warns against overskepticism: we have no right to infer from (hypothetical) literary borrowings that any one episode is fictitious. La Penna puts it well: “molte volte noi (e un autore antico più di noi) trasceliamo dalla nostra vita vissuta ciò che acquista senso alla luce delle reminiscenze letterarie” (1993, 45-46).

41. Although aurea primarily modifies funis, with an Iliadic golden rope as precedent, it may be taken secondarily with saecla, recalling Hesiod's “golden race.”

42. According to Plutarch (Ant. 35.1), Antony with three hundred ships was refused entry to Brundisium, so sailed to Tarentum instead; and Octavia and others, including Maecenas and Agrippa, persuaded Octavian to meet there peaceably with Antony. Appian ignores Antony's hostile feelings and his rejection by the suspicious men of Brundisium: “for him the meeting was peaceable, and it seems that it was always planned for Tarentum” (Pelling 1988, 213). “If Maecenas had earlier travelled to Brundisium with Horace …, he presumably doubled back to join [Octavian]'s main retinue” (214). The sequence of events and their causes eludes scholars today and may not have been much clearer to Horace, or even to Maecenas, at the time.

43. Loss of control: Oliensis 1995, esp. 211-13; dealing with conflicting aims (elite readership/popularity and fame), 215-16.

44. Cf. Van Rooy 1965; Leach 1978; Zetzel 1980; Parker 1986; Freudenburg 1993, 198-211.

45. Leach 1978, 82-83.

46. Leach 1978, 96-97; Putnam 1970, 293-341. Leach more optimistically emphasizes “the achievement of an artistic identity through the completion of a poetic book” as marked in each epilogue (96); but on the same page, she admits that “to these damaging encroachments of the real world that art cannot control there is no answer save reassertion of the poet's faith in artistic order for its own sake.”

47. I am grateful to Susanna Braund and David Konstan for their advice and encouragement; to our departmental brown bag luncheon group, who heard and responded to a short version of this essay; and to the thoughtful advice of an unnamed referee who, inter alia, suggested further comparisons with Virgil and Tibullus that seemed promising but might have seduced me too far beyond my chosen bounds.

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