Playing at Lyric’s Boundaries: Dreaming Forward in Book Two of Horace’s Sermones

• Main Author: Kirk Freudenburg
• Format: Article
• Language: deu
• Published: Université Lille-3 2010-10-01
• Series: Dictynna
• Subjects: Horace; Hipponax; Epodes; Sermones; satire; Lucilius
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/dictynna/228

In this paper I look at the ways in which certain poems of Sermones Book Two and the Epodes routinely look past their own generic horizons to spy on an alternate, and highly idealized, poetic landscape that lies just ahead in the poet’s career. Like rich fields waiting to be developed and tended, the Odes occupy the poet’s time and thoughts in the late 30’s B.C.E. These ‘singing’ poems, like a newly purchased farm, await his full-time attention, even while he is still deeply enmeshed in the life of the city and the generic enterprises that need to be finished there. The Odes, poems given special urgency by Octavian’s victory at Actium, are thus constructed as a dreamscape that the poet wants to enter but, as yet, cannot. To make my case, I focus especially on Sermones 2.6, treating that poem’s many extra-generic glosses not only as a means of locating the host-genre’s center, but as a way of chafing at its too narrow limits, and perhaps also as a way of signaling how the poet intends to break new ground in the Odes, as a poet deeply committed to mode-mixing, variation, and ironic play. The pressures and restrictions that come with being a satirist in 31-30 B.C.E. are played out in this poem. And Horace’s own extra-generic pipe-dreaming, I suggest, is at the heart of its concluding fable.