63 Colloquial and Li.. - Ganino.com

The quotidian in Horace, Satire 1.5 259
Satire 1.5, the ‘Journey to Brundisium’, which famously never gets to
Tarentum, the telos of the politically charged odyssey towards which
Maecenas and his retinue were directed, immediately poses an obvious
problem for a topic such as this. Even if Porphyrio had not told us as
much, the remains of Book 3 of Lucilius’ Satires (thirty-seven fragments
amounting to sixty lines or parts of lines) make it quite clear that the
journey is a literary one, and in a tradition of literary journeys, so that
any word, phrase or line of it may for the ancient reader of Horace have
converted what appears colloquial into something different, depending on
what Lucilius was doing with his own linguistic register, and also depending
on how Horace interacted with that prior effect. The poem emphatically
puts into practice the Callimachean theory laid down in Satires 1.4 and
1.10: good as he may have been, and he was certainly more polished than
his predecessors, Lucilius simply will not do in the current poetic culture
in which polish, revision and perfection in writing are what matters:
. . . fuerit Lucilius, inquam,
comis et urbanus, fuerit limatior idem 65
quam rudis et Graecis intacti carminis auctor
quamque poetarum seniorum turba; sed ille,
si foret hoc nostrum fato delapsus in aevum,
detereret sibi multa, recideret omne quod ultra
perfectum traheretur, et in versu faciendo 70
saepe caput scaberet vivos et roderet unguis.
(Sat. 1.10.64–71)
Granted Lucilius was cultured and urbane, granted he was more polished than
one would expect from an author of a raw genre untouched by the Greeks, more
polished also than the host of older poets; but if the fates had brought him down
in time to this modern age of ours, there’s much you’d find him trimming as he
cut back everything that went beyond perfection, constantly scratching his head
and biting his nails to the quick as he composed his verse.
Long before Horace tersely ends Satire 1.5 (the shortest of the book to
this point) with the faux-weary utterance Brundisium longae finis chartaeque
viaeque est ‘Brundisium is the end of my long work and journey’
(1.5.104), readers familiar with the Lucilian model will have followed the
ways in which Horatian revision of the model is effected. The wording
longae...chartae, though at odds with the actual length of 104 lines,
defines the poem as an epic, and Horace has done plenty to help affirm
that final sphragis. As I have suggested elsewhere, 6 the poem approximates
6 Thomas 2006: 62. There have been good recent treatments of Sat. 1.5’s play with epic by Gowers
(1993) and Harrison (2007: 86–9).