Satires Ii

The satires explored in this volume are some of the trickiest poems of ancient Rome's trickiest poet. Horace was an ironist, sneaky smart, and prone to hiding things under the surface. His Latin is dense and difficult. The challenges posed by these satires are especially acute because their voices, messages, and stylistic habits are many, and their themes range from the poet's anxieties about the limits of satiric free speech in the first poem to the ridiculous excesses of an outrageously overdone dinner party in the last. For students working at intermediate and advanced levels of Latin, this book makes the satires of Horace's second book of Sermones readable by explaining difficult issues of grammar, syntax, word-choice, genre, period, and style. For scholars who already know these poems well, it offers fresh insights into what satire is, and how these poems communicate as uniquely 'Horatian' expressions of the genre.

Embedded in a discussion of the 18th century literary practice of imitation, this study offers an in-depth analysis of the three full-length satires from Alexander Pope’s Imitations of Horace. Taking into account aspects such as content, metre, message, personal references, and language, the three satires are compared to their Latin originals, shedding light on how Pope succeeds in transferring the texts into his contemporary world and idiom whilst sticking very closely to the original framework on a larger scale. Thus, they “show the poet bound hand and foot and yet dancing as if free.“

Provides a comprehensive overview for both beginning and advanced students of satiric forms from ancient poetry to contemporary digital media.

"Daniel Randolph Deal is a Southern aristocrat, having the required bloodline, but little of the nobility. A man resistant to the folly of ethics, he prefers a selective, self-indulgent morality. He is a confessed hedonist, albeit responsibly so."--Back cover