LIES, DECEITS, MANIPULATIONS, AND OTHER FORMS OF AESTHETIC EXPRESSION IN HORACE, SATIRES 2.5

Abstract

Finagling an inheritance is one time-tested way of resolving a money shortage: just flatter your way into the good graces of the aged and rich. In Satires 2.5 Horace parodies the Roman version of this vice, known as captatio or ‘legacy-hunting’; with baroque imagination, he presents Odysseus, the mythological hero, consulting the prophet Tiresias in the Underworld and learning how to increase his fortune by amassing inheritances. Odysseus asks: tu protinus, unde | diuitias aerisque ruam, dic, augur, aceruos (‘tell me forthwith, prophet, where I can dig up riches and heaps of money’, 21f.). Tiresias responds: captes astutus ubique | testamenta senum (‘cleverly snatch on all sides the testaments of old men’, 23f.). Social critique naturally looms large in this poem about venal dishonesty. In major studies, Niall Rudd and Klaus Sallmann have examined the poem's criticism of contemporary Roman society, and later scholars have taken a similar line, often reading the poem as a send-up of flattery. All true, but there is more to say. Even as it treats of wills, money, and flattery, the satire also shows a quiet concern with aesthetic issues, especially the state of contemporary poetry.