caa a22 4500 388023600 CHVBK 20180307124931.0 cr unu---uuuuu 161130s1998 xx s 000 0 eng 10.1017/S0048671X00001867 doi S0048671X00001867 pii (NATIONALLICENCE)cambridge-10.1017/S0048671X00001867 Turpin William Swarthmore College The Epicurean Parasite: Horace, Satires 1.1-3 [Elektronische Daten] [William Turpin] We have learned a great deal in recent years about reading Horace's satires; there is now widespread agreement that the speaker of the satires is himself a character within them, a persona. Such a persona may be most effective when it has obvious connections with its creator, but that fact does not preclude the exaggeration of reality, or even its complete inversion. For Horace the implications of this approach are exciting: instead of a poet discoursing with cheerful earnestness on morality, on poetry and on his daily life, we have a fictional character, whom we do not have to take seriously at all. The three diatribe satires present us with a character so absurd that they have been taken, I think rightly, as parodies. Although the poems were once appreciated as effective moralising sermons, even their admirers found it hard to justify the lack of intellectual coherence, to say nothing of the astonishing vulgarity of the second satire. As parodies, however, the poems are wonderfully successful. The speaker trots out a series of banalities: ‘people should be content with who they are'; ‘people should not go to extremes'; ‘people should be consistent'. But he invariably gets distracted, goes off on tangential rants, and makes a fool of himself. The moralist of the first three satires is, to put it bluntly, a jerk. Copyright © Aureal Publications 1998 Ramus Cambridge University Press 27/2(1998), 127-140 0048-671X 27:2<127 1998 27 RMU https://doi.org/10.1017/S0048671X00001867 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research-article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0048671X00001867 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 100 1- Turpin William Swarthmore College NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- Ramus Cambridge University Press 27/2(1998), 127-140 0048-671X 27:2<127 1998 27 RMU CC0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0 nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-cambridge