Newman, John Kevin
Horace as Outsider

Horace, a favourite poet, has been distorted to suit his admirers' fancy. What in fact was it like to be the gifted son of a former slave trying to make an incongruous career in a reactionary Rome? He lost one patron at Philippi. To please a second, he took to writing verse which he himself describes as nugatory and even ludicrous. When vatic Virgil died, he lost half his soul. In his last compositions, he laid the foundation for a propaganda of enlightened despotism which would serve later Europe ill. Two appendixes discuss firstly the suggestion, made over a century ago, that Horace's father may have been an Alexandrian Jew; and secondly the reception of Horace by the outsider prince of Russian letters, and subject of another Caesar-Tsar, Alexander Pushkin. From the table of contents: Horace and his problems. Vice and virtue. The broken self. Horace and Republican poetry. The outsider: Further perspectives. Roman "satura" before Horace. The "Sermones" I. The "Sermones" II: Lucilius and Persius. The "Iambi" I: the rape of a genre. The "Iambi" II. The lyrist: "Carmina" I-III. The first book of Epistles. "Carmina" IV: poems 1-5. "Carmina" IV: poems 6-15. The second book of Epistles and "De arte poetica liber". X,516 Seiten, broschiert (Spudasmata. Studien zur Klassischen Philologie und ihren Grenzgebieten; Band 136/Olms Verlag 2011) leichte Lagerspuren/minor shelfwear